


Of Physics and Futures

by InfiniteCalm



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Carlos cheers him up, Carlos is a Good Boyfriend, Carlos is smart, Cecil is just really tired, Cecil is sad, Entropy, Fluffy, M/M, Physics, Romance, carlos the scientist - Freeform, pure fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfiniteCalm/pseuds/InfiniteCalm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After my wildly optimistic headcanon for the ending of Old Oak Doors part B, Carlos realizes that actually, everything might not be so wonderfully OK after all. What's  a perfectly imperfect scientist to do? In scientific terms, of course. Pure fluff. Literally. Nothing but pain medication for last month's episodes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Physics and Futures

Carlos sighed in affectionate discomfort. Beside him, Cecil was sprawled out, like a cat, pretending to sleep. It had been two weeks since he’d returned home, and yet neither one could relax at all. There as real money again, real food, and no strex corp, now, but something fundamental had changed in the town. Cecil hadn’t said as much, but it was making him miserable. He’d been cagey and tense, paler even than usual. Carlos was observant (the third thing a scientist was,) and so he’d noticed weight lost over the past six months had not been regained at all. Earlier that day, he'd noticed several grey hairs in Cecil’s usually uniform blonde locks.

Also, Cecil was a terrible liar, and clutching Carlos way too tightly for someone who was supposedly sleeping. Ah, well.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Carlos said, quietly, eyes focused on the ceiling. He felt Cecil’s gaze but didn’t turn to look, instead covering his boyfriend’s hand with his own. ‘I’ve been thinking about how insignificant this’ he motioned his free arm around the strangely furnished room, ‘all is. I mean- Night Vale is by no means a big town, and this desert is not a big desert, and America, although it seems it, doesn’t have even 5% of the world’s population. And, when you zoom out, all the way out, Earth doesn’t even nearly cover 5% of Jupiter’s area. Not even close! And then the Sun is like 5000% bigger than Jupiter, and then one day that will expand and get even bigger… but even then it’d small, because there are stars that we know of that are 5000 times bigger than ours, and when they die they explode, white hot, explosions so big they can take out hundreds of solar systems, each with suns and planets, and hell, maybe even populations of their own. But even with all that mass, even then, if you shrunk the universe down to the size of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, then all that matter would be the size of _three grains of sand._ The rest is all- well, void, you call it. All the life in this vast, vast place, that small. And I thought- used to think for the longest time- that that made everything kind of pointless. It used to make me sad. Until I met you, that is.

‘Because I then carried on thinking. I realized about entropy. I’m a terrible physicist, really: I forgot entropy! It’s the process of everything drifting away, becoming less and less and less organized. And then I thought, oh: it gets smaller. And yes, it does. Supernovae become small and condensed and form new things. How wonderful! New things, out of the old things. Our sun will, yes, get bigger- far away from this time- but then, it will retract. The Earth is small, and cosy, and staying that way. I think America will shrink, due to tectonic plates. Night Vale, though, is always going to be Night Vale. Think on that. They tried, but they couldn’t take this away. It’s small. But then, at the heart of it, so is everything else. ‘So then, I wondered why I started out with big, but ended up with small. But that, Cecil, was the wrong question. I realized that two weeks ago. I started at Night Vale. I ended at Night Vale. I started with You. I ended with You. You seem to be the answer to my question. Why do I bother at all? You, my darling one. You! I love you so much! I love your hair, your eyes, your arse, your heart. I love your biggest, most complex tattoos, and your smallest hydrogen atom. I could not ever not love you. I could not ever stop. Remember that, at least.’

He fell silent. Cecil’s eyes were open and bright with what could hardly have been tears, surely? It took him a while to speak. ‘Oh _Carlos_.’ He said, quite overcome. ‘My perfectly imperfect… where would I be without you?’ Cecil kissed Carlos’ hand, smiling like he could not stop, and then they slept, for reals this time. Night spun on. The world got gradually smaller.


End file.
